Results for “TT Platform”

The following is a guest post by Christopher Rodriguez, chief marketing and relationship management officer of Eris Exchange, and Geoffrey Sharp, Eris’ managing director and head of sales. Eris is a U.S. futures exchange that offers listed interest rate swap futures. Trading Technologies offers connectivity to Eris through both the TT® and X_TRADER® platforms.

Some traders were more prepared than others for the results of the U.S. presidential election in November. Higher implied volatility, changes in risk premium and increases in interest rates resulted from Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Equity markets plunged then rallied. All told, the month of November was remarkable for traders.

Heading into Thanksgiving, 10-year Treasury Note Yields reached highs not seen since the middle of 2015. The bond sell-off tapered toward month-end, but the forwards predicted a more aggressively rising rate environment. (more…)

The following is a guest post authored by Geoffrey Parker. He is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College and a visiting scholar and research fellow at the MIT Initiative for the Digital Economy. Before joining academia, he held positions in engineering and finance at General Electric. He has made significant contributions to the economics of network effects as co-developer of the theory of two-sided networks. He received his BS from Princeton and his MS and PhD from MIT. You can follow Geoff on Twitter at @g2parker.

Given the dramatic change now underway in financial markets and exchanges, it’s tempting to believe that the industry is in uncharted territory. And, as we’ll see below, there is some truth to this view. However, it’s worth remembering that the industry went through a similar phase of change when exchanges such as the CME became electronic instead of physical markets. Floor traders gave way to traders sitting at computer terminals and, increasingly, to algorithmic trading machines. Electronic completion offered a number of immediate advantages that included better price discovery, improved access to markets and a better ability to create customized products that better fit needs. For example, firms that wished to smooth the value of assets such as power plants or pipelines against commodity price volatility were able to tailor their hedging strategies to their exact needs.

FIA Expo is here again, and as always, for those of us who provide solutions to the futures industry, it provides a great opportunity for assessing the past year and talking about plans for the future. This year has been one of growth and continued evolution at Trading Technologies. In the last few Expos, we were talking about where we were going with the TT® platform alongside our legacy platform, X_TRADER®, but 2016 finally gives us the opportunity to talk in terms of where we have been and the benefits users of TT see compared with other offerings in the market.

While TT and X_TRADER are not yet at feature parity, that is due in part to the fact that we have been investing in TT to build new features and functionality that have never been available in X_TRADER while also investing heavily in the performance and flexibility it offers in terms of automated trading.

The TT® platform has been available for more than a year now, and in that time, we have been very conscious of seeking input from users. Through a series of webinars and training presentations, I have been fortunate to get first-hand feedback.

Three of the topics that traders keep coming back to are accessibility, speed and flexibility. Let’s take a deeper look at each characteristic.(more…)